To create your best artwork and to really enjoy painting, you need to learn how color harmony works. If your colors aren't harmonious (if they become discordant, like sour notes in music), then your entire painting will seem lifeless or downright unattractive—even if you've painted everything else correctly!

Fortunately, the basic principles of color are easy to learn because there are only six color schemes. Simple, huh? So, let's get started!

Incidentally, the first color wheel was devised in 1666 by the genius Isaac Newton, and no one has ever come up with a better way to show how color harmony works.

THE COLOR WHEEL

A standard color wheel has two sides. Side A (see Illustration A) shows you how to mix two colors to create a third color—such as mixing yellow with red to get orange.
To use Side A of the wheel, simply dial a color on the rim of the inside disk to line up with any color on the outside disk; the resulting color will appear in the window.

At the center of the wheel are several geometric shapes. These indicate various color schemes. Because color harmony depends on various colors' relationships to one another on the wheel.

For example, at the center of the wheel, look at the equilateral triangle that's labeled "Triad." Regardless of how you spin the inner disk, whatever three colors are at the points of that triangle will always be harmonious in a painting (such as green, violet and orange; or yellow, blue and red). Basically, that's how the color wheel works.
Now, let us examine the six color schemes.

MONOCHROMATIC

This is the simplest color scheme but also the most restrictive to an artist. It consists of just one hue (red, for example, as in the illustration Two Cherries) and that color can be mixed with various amounts of white or black for variations in chroma (intensity) and value. Think of a monochromatic painting like a black-and-white photo seen through a colored filter.